


wherever you are (every step together)

by cassiopia



Series: your faith gives me strength (strength to believe) [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Romance, Secret Relationship, bby!ahsoka is cute, teenagers in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-03-27
Packaged: 2018-03-19 22:26:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3626553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassiopia/pseuds/cassiopia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which changing the world is pretty hard when you’re a 17-year-old high school student, but it might be a little easier if Padmé can admit she isn't alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wherever you are (every step together)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back!
> 
> So have a fic. This could take place either before or after the first fic in the series, feel free to pick for yourself.
> 
> Many thanks to the fabulous fialleril on tumblr who test read this, soothed my rampant insecurities and was overall a huge encouragement. You rock!
> 
> Happy reading!

Padmé pulled at the fabric draped around her shoulders, gathering it tighter as she ducked out of the cab. She adjusted the long silver-blue skirt of her dress and walked tiredly up one of the many identical drives towards a tall, quiet house. Each cookie cutter house had a white fence and a flower bed all seemingly planted with the same flowers in the same pattern. It looked like a postcard.

It looked like no place Anakin would ever willingly spend time.

Not that she knew where Anakin spent most of his time. She had done her best not to mix their lives too much. Neither his friends nor her parents had any idea they spent as much time as they did together, in dusty, secluded classrooms and her massive, empty house. They had no idea how they spent that time either.

It bothered him. The idea that she might be ashamed.

She wasn't. She just didn't want to get too attached.

The street was deserted and she stepped up to the door unobserved. It was past 10:00 and the sun had long since set. She was sorely underdressed for the sharp warning of winter that hung in the air.

She knocked twice on the door. It swung open to apparently empty air - until she glanced down. A tiny head bobbed at waist level, fuzzy markings on her round cheeks and tiny montrals curving down to lie on her Wonder Woman pyjamas.

She froze up a little, wondering what exactly the correct social protocol was for this situation. She didn't have the opportunity to speak to children very often and she definitely didn't knock on their doors late at night.

"Hi." Padmé blinked, surprised, and didn’t reply. The child continued, bold as brass. "You’re pretty. I like your headdress."

Her hand flew to the silver filigree bands braided into her hair. She smiled. What had she been thinking? She was a child. Hardly a starving rancor.

"Thank you. Is Anakin here?"

She nodded and filled her lungs, her chest expanding like a pufferfish. She bellowed, “Skyguy! The lady wants to talk to you!”

"Ahsoka? Did you answer the door again? I told you not to do that. And stop yelling please, you know Mrs Nu will complain if we make too much noise, anything to get rid of me." Anakin’s voice came from somewhere back inside the house, sounding slightly harried.

He wandered into view, drying his hands on a towel.

He was wearing what she privately referred to as his ‘completely-respectable-please-trust-me’ clothes, probably for the sake of Ahsoka’s parents and overbearing neighbours. Plain black jeans with no wear or rips, long sleeved grey t-shirt, face scrubbed clean and hair combed and gelled. He had cut it a few weeks ago and she had almost wanted to thank him. It had gotten so bad he had begun to look like a wookie but now she suddenly missed his wild mop of curls with an almost physical ache.

She suddenly realised that she had been staring at him for long seconds and the awkwardness made her burn internally.

She wondered nervously how time could sometimes be like this. Stretching a single moment out into an eternity.

She knew that coming here like this was a betrayal of the unwritten rules. She had tried not to need him, not to rely on him.

She had failed.

This was a homecoming in someone else’s house; reaching out in trust.

She was done playing it safe. She could have everything she wanted. He had never let her down before. Anakin _was_ loyalty, he carried it in every bone and muscle.

And that was why she could take the risks the way she never had.

She felt hyperaware, watching him, willing him to understand the importance of a simple gesture. She could have been tired, hungry, annoyed (in fact she was all three) or it could have been a whim. But it wasn't.

There, in the slight softening at the corners of his eyes, dropping the tension he carried with everyone but her because he could believe in a future with her to remind him.

"Come in."

——————————————

Padmé sat awkwardly in her boyfriend’s lap, one of his bony ankles digging into her thigh, head ducked down and his fingers lost deep in her hair. The evening’s curls had become the night’s frizz and in a Togruta household, of course there was no hairbrush.

She had managed to change at least, out of expensive, impractical silver-blue silk into sweatpants and one of Ani’s oversized hoodies that she had claimed for her own, old and soft with holes in the cuffs through which she liked to stick her thumbs and Anakin’s scent clinging to the collar. Engine grease and ozone and herbal tea, a contradiction, and wasn’t that basically the definition of Ani?

She shifted her head and caught Ahsoka staring at them, not terribly stealthily.

Caught, she didn’t pretend shame, just narrowed her eyes and declared, “You two are pretty gross you know?”

"Wait a few years, you might change your tune." Anakin was shifting groggily as he spoke - coursework at a school like Coruscant Academy would take it out of anyone even without babysitting and the shifts he worked at a slightly disreputable garage downtown. The story of how he had acquired the job was long, convoluted and had something to do with a podrace and a ‘friend of one of Rex’s cousins ex-girlfriend’s.’ She had gotten (she suspected) about three quarters of the story from a mixture of sources and a year later she still wasn’t sure which parts of it were true.

"Say good night, you gotta be up tomorrow." Anakin said as he carefully disentangled his fingers and dislodged her from her seat – she stood and stretched, one leg completely numb – before carefully lifting a squirming Ahsoka. She wriggled until he bent his neck so she could clamber onto his back. She perched awkwardly there, too big for his gangly frame, hands grasping at his neck.

Padmé leant in to kiss her cheek. "Good night Ahsoka.”

"G’night,” she replied sleepily.

Anakin carried her out, their voices a fading murmur as they moved away. Padmé leant back, closed her eyes and let herself drift for a few moments. She had at least another hour and a half until she had to leave and keep the young girl’s parents from knowing she had been there. Assuming Ahsoka could remember to keep the secret - she had promised enthusiastically but it would be easy for her to forget or get carried away which would mean Anakin losing this job, which was simple and generally non-stressful but paid well and went a long way to covering the costs of his books and travel and equipment and everything not covered by his scholarships that he would never let anyone else help shoulder the burden of-

She jumped nearly a foot into the air when a hand landed on her shoulder. She twisted around but Ani was already swinging over the back of the couchto join her.

He sat down close by and tucked her head under his chin. She stayed still for long breaths, in and out again and again. She closed her eyes. He tried to shift them further back but she clenched her hands in his shirt and he stilled.

"That bad?"

“Goddess I need a drink right now.”

"That bad."

He wrapped one arm around her waist and the other around her shoulders and held her tight.

"I thought you were excited. That some snake skin you wanted to talk to about the funding for the community centre was coming."

"He did come. Made disdainful small talk for five minutes, was rescued by an aide and did a very good job of avoiding me after that. Never mind he’s the representative for the district; why should he spare a thought for the people he’s meant to be representing,” she reported bitterly. Gripped suddenly by restlessness, she pulled free. He let her slip away and shove to her feet. She wasn't tired anymore, she was angry, not quite yelling but turning harsh and cutting as she spoke.

"No one listens. None of them. They look at me and it's like they pity me. Poor girl, still convinced she's living a fairy tale, the hero of the story. Or worse, still convinced anyone in the world cares about anything but their bank accounts. Sometimes I think that the whole exercise is completely useless. That everything I throw into this is just wasted."

She had given so much time and energy and now her whole future and it where had it gotten her? Nowhere. She felt like there was no point in any of it.

Anakin was standing now, just barely out of reach. His jaw had the slight jut that meant he wasn’t backing down.

"It's not. You have so many plans Padmé. Ideas, good ideas, and you’re gonna do things with them.”

“Am I? It seems impossible. And what use are all my plans and promises if I can’t follow them with action?”

“You’re going to follow them."

He reached out and grasped her wrist.

"Don’t give up, don’t you dare give up. It _is_ important Padmé, important to a lot of people, even if they’re not the ones that get heard. You have so much to give, you’re _not_ wasting your life, you’re doing more with it that any of those prissy useless blitherers ever will. You’re _going_ to change things and the whole damn world is gonna see it."

Their eyes were locked. She felt something rising in her throat. Beyond the rushing in her ears, she absentmindedly thought that they were being far too loud. They would wake the neighbours at this rate, much less Ahsoka.

They were both breathing hard, and the tension in the room was like a tangible force. The silence held for a long instant, like a too thin thread stretched too tight between them.

She snapped it.

“You think that?"

He thawed and iced over simultaneously, the frightening intensity that he brought to the things that really mattered in his gaze once more.

"You’ve been changing my world since the day you stepped into it. I know you’re gonna go out there and change other people’s lives the same way."

She walked to him, slowly, drawn. She pushed him back to the couch. He sat. She pushed again. He lay back.

“You never said. You never said.”

He tipped his head back to look up at her. She hovered, caught, exposed and yet encircled, held up high by the look in his eyes.

"You’re going to do everything you ever said you would. And I will be right there every single day.”

She shoved him down and kissed him, holding him down into someone else’s couch cushions, not caring about anything else in the world.

Nothing else could ever matter as much as this.

Nothing could ever come between them and they were going to build a world together and _nothing_ anyone said could change that.

 


End file.
